


Scars

by Harukami



Category: DRAMAtical Murder
Genre: M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-10
Updated: 2014-03-10
Packaged: 2018-01-15 05:18:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1292830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harukami/pseuds/Harukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aoba's started to notice people's scars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scars

Koujaku has scars all over his body. Aoba's used enough to them these days that he doesn't think about them beyond a faint realization of their presence. When he thinks about Koujaku's sadness, his attention is more drawn to the unhappy way Koujaku's skin carries his tattoos; when he thinks of Koujaku's joy, his liveliness, it's the body underneath he sees, the movement of muscles as Koujaku reaches out to draw him close, the warm tone of his skin, the way Koujaku's body really is a cohesive whole under all that.

He notices the scars, though, at the strangest times. The way the scar on his nose stretches when Koujaku smiles too widely, not the ikemen smile he gives his customers but a broad, startled laughter. The way the slashes on his arms stand out when Koujaku's stripped his kimono to his waist to work around the place, tidying and lifting things.

Once, post-sex, they're curled together and Koujaku's still holding his hand, lying on Aoba's back in an exhausted shared happiness, and Aoba opens his eyes and sees their hands tangled together right in front of his face, sees the torn scars across Koujaku's knuckles. It passes through him like a cold chill, a realization that must have been hanging around in his subconscious and not settling until now: scars like that come from punching until your knuckles are raw and bloody. He was forced to beat his family to death and he sees that on the back of his hand with every task he does. Every time he drinks, he sees it on the back of his hand as he tilts his sakazuke. When he cuts hair, he sees it as he draws their hair out carefully, as he tilts his scissors. When he makes love, he sees it on the hand he spreads on Aoba's body.

Koujaku must feel Aoba tense, because he stirs too. His voice is concerned: "Aoba?"

"It's nothing," Aoba says, and kisses the back of Koujaku's hand.

If Koujaku realizes what Aoba's doing, what he's thought, he doesn't say. Instead he draws back enough to roll Aoba over, and leans down, smiling -- just a small tilt of his lips, not enough to pull at the scar on his nose at all -- and kisses him to begin round two.

*

Clear's mismatched skin is barely apparent most of the time. His skin tone is close enough to the Alpha series' that in dim lighting, there's no difference at all. Possibly they were the same once, but Clear, being the older prototype, shows the lighter skin with age. 

But when they're out in the sun, it's starkly apparent. He laughs, and helps Tae with the gardening in the small plot around the edge of the house, and looks like he was made of patchwork. Aoba doesn't comment -- for one thing, he's working himself, pulling weeds under Tae's supervision; none of them want her to work more than she has to, with her hips the way they are, and only by acting like it's entirely their own desire will she keep herself from doing so. Well, in Clear's case, it probably _is_ his own desire.

And it doesn't bother him, exactly. It reminds him, and that does bother him -- the memory of Clear's face peeling away, of that arm totally lacking anything resembling a human shape, of the metal tubing of his ribs exposed under Aoba's exploratory touch. That bothers him, reminds him of those intense months of grieving and fear, loss which he couldn't settle into accepting because there was a possibility that Clear may not have been lost. 

But at the same time, he knows that Clear wears this with pride. There's probably some shame in it, too -- he wears his siblings' skin like he's some kind of frankenstein's monster. But it marks his survival, which is what makes it all right for Aoba to see. What makes it all right for Clear is probably something more convoluted, or perhaps more simple -- it marks his _autonomy_ , his ability to overcome the various safeties that were built into his body to prevent him from becoming disobedient. If he hadn't done so, he'd have been pure and untouched and perfect, and probably reprogrammed into something more like what the Alphas were. Like his blind eye and his deaf ear, these are imperfections that could be lost by transferring his self -- the collection of circuits and chips that make up his personality and his thoughts -- into a whole body of one of the Alpha series. But it's a precious body to him.

"Aoba-san! Over here, look at this, what kind of bug is this?"

When Aoba leans over Clear to check and answer -- "A caterpillar," he says. "It'll be a butterfly someday." -- he casts a shadow on Clear that hides the marks again.

*

At first, he doesn't look at Ren's naked body too closely. Well, it's only natural to be a bit embarrassed. Even if they're having sex now, it's Ren he's having sex with, using this body as the way to do so, but the body itself is -- was -- Sei's. It feels different to be focusing on the moment, and the significance of the moment, than it does to stop and comb his gaze over Ren's body, to allow himself to look at Ren fully, to be attracted to Ren fully.

Being physically attracted to Ren is strange and embarrassing, because loving and wanting 'Ren' just feels inherently different than being sexually aroused by his twin brother's abandoned body.

But eventually he starts to get used to the idea; eventually he lets himself look more and more. The base body is Sei's, but it's Ren's now, and it's Ren wearing it, and it's all right, he thinks, to let himself enjoy the body that Ren is trying so hard to master, to make his own. He lets himself touch, he lets himself look, and he starts noticing things that he hadn't noticed before.

He notices the lines of small puckered scars up the inside of Ren's arms. For a while, he doesn't realize what they are, but eventually it dawns on him: they're needle marks. He's not unfamiliar with drug use, but he doesn't think, knowing what little he knows, that Sei was an addict. It doesn't seem like something Sei has done to himself, but of course, Sei was an experimental subject.

After that, he notices more; it's not like he looks for them, but he sees them. More and more injection points -- the backs of his knees, his ankles, his wrists, even his neck. Just constant little holes all over this body that have healed over. Then, worse, he sees small, thin-lined scars across the back of Ren's eyelids, along the lower lid just under the lashes. 

"Ren..."

"Aoba?" Ren opens his eyes, sleepily. "...What's wrong?"

But of course, Ren doesn't know about them. There's nothing Aoba can do to inquire into the history, to try to understand Sei, to hear Sei's troubles and fears and loneliness now. It fills him with a sickening melancholy and he curls into Ren's embrace while Ren, suddenly and quite obviously frantic with worry and a desperation to please Aoba, to cheer him up, holds him more tightly and frets at him.

*

Noiz's got a complexion that hides them well, but Aoba sees them constantly, the remnants of injuries Noiz took but would have been unable to feel at the time. There's the obvious ones, the cuts all over his hands from damage he did with them, the broken fingers which healed poorly, scabbed up knees and elbows from falls he had barely noticed. Then, there's the inconsequential scars on his face and neck, the tiny puckered marks where piercings had been removed. Those are so faint and so small that Aoba sometimes forgets they're there, but up close, when they're almost nose to nose on the pillow at night, he can see them and remember how different Noiz looked while not really looking different at all.

Those scars don't make Aoba wince. They make him feel a little sad, a little melancholy, like he's mourning a little for so many injuries that nobody noticed or cared about, not Noiz, not any of the people who were meant to be taking care of him. Like Noiz won't anymore, so Aoba does. But the ones that make him wince are the ones he knows hurt Noiz.

There are scrape marks all over his back. There's a faint spattering of grit permanently embedded under his skin, little black marks that look more like freckles if you didn't know that it's concrete dust and graphite that got ground into his body. "I still can't believe you did that," he says sometimes, spreading his fingers on Noiz's back.

Noiz snorts. "Whatever," he says. "Are you complaining, after I saved you? Jerk."

"I'm not complaining--"

"You saying I'm ugly now? I'm hurt," Noiz says, smugly, no trace of hurt in his voice at all.

"Who said that?! I didn't say that!"

"You're fussing over something pointless. We're in bed together, so how about admiring me instead?"

"You little--!"

And eventually Aoba's forced to stop dwelling on the idea of Noiz, feeling pain for the first time, shielding him from debris with no complaints, with little on his face but the gratitude at _wanting_ to shield someone else from pain.

*

It's actually genuinely surprising to Aoba how unmarked Mink's skin is. It's rich and firm and solid and smooth, and he's pretty sure _he's_ got more scars here and there, and as much as he had a reputation of a scrapper, he's gotten in way fewer fights than Mink has. He wasn't in a fire, he wasn't an experimental subject, he'd never been in prison, and he'd never kept order in a prison gang. Mink's life is like a list of things that should leave him with knotted, heavy scars, but instead his skin is remarkably soft but for the calluses on his hands.

It's not like Aoba'd bring it up, of course; after the first few times he actually saw Mink naked, it became a background thing, something unnoticeable entirely because there was nothing to notice. So Mink had a good skin-care regimen or something, or had managed, somehow, to carry all his damage without bearing it on his skin. So Mink was unscarred; it wasn't a big deal or anything worth comment.

That's how he thinks. 

But then, one afternoon, he goes for a walk. He's not working for the next couple of days, he's already got the prep work for dinner done, and Mink is out working himself. He's in the habit of walking during those times, exploring new parts of the area around their cabin. He tries to pick a different path each time.

He's been to parts of the area that show the remnants of fire before, the scorched earth and burned trees and lifeless area. Normally, he turns away there, but he's explored most of the grounds around it before, and so with a sense of _why not_ he walks through it.

What he'd seen before was only the outskirts.

Aoba had known that, but knowing something and fully realizing it is different. Knowing 'this was Mink's people's land, and it was burned, and they were killed or kidnapped and _then_ killed' is something that had happened on an intellectual level, even with the emphasis of scrap. Walking into what had once been a village, with collapsed piles of rubble, with still-standing burned out shells of houses, with the remnants of signage and glass from windows and belongings from the insides of buildings all scattered through the area... that makes it something else altogether. 

He stops in an area that he wants to think of as the centre of town, simply by virtue of being somewhat separated from the remains around it, and inhales the lingering sense of char before turning to go back. The images, the smell, even the taste of the air aren't leaving him.

Not unscarred after all, he thinks. 

*

Aoba thinks he's a pretty together guy. He's got his life more or less in order, he's cleaned up his act from the weird wild days of his childhood. He's got a steady job and a weird dog-self boyfriend who he loves and a granny he takes care of and most of the time he can forget that there's not just one of him, that he's not missing a third of himself who became someone else (and that's good, he's happy, they're happy together, but he's aware there are ways his mind just no longer works). Most of the time he can forget that voice in the back of his head that he's trying to absorb into himself, that he's trying to embrace and accept but can still feel all the jagged edges between the Aoba who is himself, whose thoughts he's privy to, and the Aoba who's someone else altogether, a completely separate part he doesn't understand yet; the farthest he's come is knowing that Aoba is also _him_.

Most of the time he forgets that he isn't even really human, any more than those twisted monstrosities he saw in Toue's experimental halls were human. That he's some weird created being who was a chimera of two people conjoined at the hair, with nerves where normal humans don't have nerves, and that the pigment in his hair and skin are things his body developed to fit in, much like a chameleon, that his true self is colorless and patterned like thoughts are patterned. That even the reason that his hair pales towards the tips is that the nerves die out there where it was originally severed, so his body can't signal to it to maintain a color, to pass for human. That even as 'himself', even ignoring his own multiple personalities, he was never meant to be one person but two people, that Sei was meant to be on the other end of his hair and that Sei's dead now, and that's why his hair feels less. Because it's no longer trying to -- what. Reattach? To his other self.

He sounds like some kind of horror game creature, when he thinks like that, and fondles his split ends to look at them and think _this isn't hair, this is a broken part of my real body and nobody else knows that, and nobody else can see that_.

Most of the times he just thinks of himself as a normal guy, but sometimes his thoughts wander down paths like _What would I be like if I really was a normal guy_ , like, would he even have this personality at all, what would his perceptions be like, how would he relate to other people, but that thought is a bit too big, so he pushes it off and plays on the computer or goes down to help Tae with the chores and manages to forget again for a while and act like he's whole.


End file.
